The views published here are of an ecosocialist nature and from the broad red, green and black political spectrum. The opinions expressed are the personal opinions of the writers and are not necessarily the view of any political parties or groupings that they belong to. Please feel free to comment on the posts here. If you would like to contact us directly, you can email us at mike.shaughnessy@btinternet.com. Follow the blog on Twitter @MikeShaugh

Tuesday, 27 August 2019

Extinction Rebellion – Our Duty to Save the Earth

The signs are
loud and clear. From the Earth. From science. From women. From children.

From
indigenous communities. From our daily lives.

The life on
this planet, and our own future, is under severe threat.

We are living
through the sixth mass extinction, driven by the limitless greed of the 1 per
cent, their blindness to the ecological limits the Earth sets and the limits
set by social justice and human rights. We forget that we are one humanity on
one planet. There is no planet B.

This is where we will live, or go extinct as
a species, with the millions that have been driven to extinction by the
violence and carelessness of the brute force misleadingly called the economy.

‘Economy’,
like ‘ecology’, is derived from oikos
– our home, the Earth. An economy that destroys our home is no longer an
economy. It is a war against the planet, the people and our future.

The Hopi
people of North America describe the phenomenon of destroying everything that
sustains a society as Powaqqatsi – ‘an
entity, a way of life, that consumes the life forces of beings in order to
further its own life’.

The Powaqqatsi phenomenon of the Hopi's is clearly in evidence today. We are dealing with a destructive force that is
taking out life forces wherever it can. If the corporations have their way, our
fragile web of life will be poisoned and broken, species will be driven to
extinction, people will lose all their freedoms to their seeds, to their food,
to their knowledge and decisions, and all social relations will be ruptured and
broken.

Life, society
and democracy are under threat. We refuse to allow this future to unfold. We
love the Earth; we embrace humanity. We celebrate our biological and cultural
diversity and we will defend the rights of the Earth, and the rights of all
citizens, including the last child, with our fearless love and compassionate
courage.

To make peace
among people we need to make peace with the Earth. To defend the human rights
of people we need to recognise the rights of Mother Earth. We need to live
through our creativity and her generosity to reduce our ecological footprint
while expanding our planetary consciousness of being an Earth family, with one
common home.

The
extermination of biological diversity and of our indigenous cultures that know
how to live in peace with Mother Earth is part of one extinction, one
interconnected war against life. Ecocide and genocide are only one indivisible process,
and they began with the idea of the colonisation of the Earth as the ‘civilising
mission’ of a ‘superior race’.

Gandhi wrote
in his book on freedom, Hind Swaraj, or
Indian Home Rule, ‘This (attacking) civilisation is such that one has only
to be patient and it will be self-destroyed.’ However, in the process of this
civilisation’s self-destruction, it is destroying the planet and our lives. It
is destroying our future.

Therefore, it
is a moral imperative to rebel against a system that is driving extinction,
exterminating species and cultures. To not cooperate has become a moral
imperative – a survival imperative. The non-cooperation must begin with the
refusal to accept that a system based on ecocide and genocide qualifies to be a
‘civilisation’.

There are better ways to live, to produce and to consume.
Extinction Rebellion begins with liberation of our minds from colonising
categories. We are diverse but equal – not ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’. The
extermination of life in its diversity cannot be justified by declaring other
species and other cultures ‘inferior creatures of God’.

The Earth is
for all beings, today and tomorrow.

I call
Extinction Rebellion ‘Satyagraha for
Life’. Satyagraha for Gandhi was non –cooperation
based on the force of truth.

Today’s
struggle for truth is that extinction and extermination are not inevitable.
They are crimes against the Earth and against humanity. And we can stop this
crime by refusing to participate in and cooperate with this project of ecocide
and genocide.

Together, as
diverse species and diverse cultures, we have the creative power to stop
extinction through non-cooperation at every level, beginning with each of us,
expanding the rebellion into ‘ever-widening, never-ascending circles’ of
interconnected life and freedom.

This is the
call of Earth Democracy. This is our highest duty as Earth citizens.